The ballpark has a retractable roof with a giant glass greenhouse façade, giving it the look of a massive, self-contained biosphere. Our team is in the early stages of a rebuild, so if they lose today we can chalk it up to better days ahead. Every twenty seconds or so they play a short blurb of a song, “Wild Thing,” “Let’s Get It Started,” “Plush.” “Day-O,” daylight come and me want to go home. Turns out (google search) they have a forty-song playlist.
Between innings a group of young men and women down on the field shimmy laterally to centerfield with a huge inflated sombrero upside down, with writing on it, presumably some local restaurant or restaurant chain. The inflatable sombrero and the sideways-moving legs of those carrying it resemble an immense and deformed crustacean scrambling desperately in search of a return to the sea, stuck and enclosed by the walls around the field and the leering, hollering masses.
Beneath mammoth ads for Southwest Airlines, Bud Light and Larry’s Shoes, above the Target bullseye logo plastered to the outfield wall, someone walks to the edge of the outfield stands with a much smaller inflated object I take for a replica of a pillow-sized taco, throws it in the general direction of the upside-down sombrero, the taco bounding off the brim of the sombrero and falling to the outfield grass, to the collective, unconvincing “awwww” of the stadium crowd. The leftfielder jogs out to his position, observing it all, pounding his glove with his fist with what can only be disdain.
A left-handed batter stands in and swings at a pitch like a blur, redirecting the blur, slower-moving and looping and askew and high into the glowing stadium lights. The ball is a small darkening object, a tiny pin-prick eclipse of the candlepower, rising impossibly high and on its descent angled straight for where we’re sitting. A man in the team regalia stands and the ball falls to him as if hit to him intentionally, or at him. He lifts his hands together to catch it, but it bounces off his hands with a meat-slap and skips to the row directly in front of us. As if the baseball is a priceless trinket dropped from the sky, something that if procured would inexorably alter the life of its new possessor, as one body and then another and another hurtle directly over us, diving headfirst, knocking us from our seats to our knees, spilling beverages. A pile of bodies in the row in front of us, a scrum, a compilation of legs and arms and torsos and grunts and jostling, and a woman walks up to the scrum, reaches in and magically produces the fouled-off baseball, holding it aloft, triumphantly, and the entire section erupts, as she turns and curtsies to the rows higher up.
